Yesterday would have been my brother Tim’s 57th birthday.  Three years ago he took his life on St. Patrick’s Day.  (This was the “very challenging time” of the “Courage” post.  See May 7, 2009.)  There were many, many ways that God upheld me through that time and many, many friends who did the same.  One of those friends was Amy Carmichael (see my last post).   Four months after Tim’s death, I read this and it was a great comfort:

For God sees the whole man, and He has a tender way of looking at a soul at its highest, not its lowest.  He does not do as we so often do, misjudge it because of what its diseased mind made its body do in a blind and broken hour.  And we have to do with a Love that can grasp the poor hands that reach out to Him in that darkness–what father would not do that?  And He is our Father.

But when those who have prayed for such a one have no assurance that there was ever any turning to Him who alone can save, then indeed we seem to be viewing a land like that hopeless country the prophet describes, whose streams shall be turned into pitch, and the dust thereof into brimstone. ‘And He shall stretch out upon it the line of confusion and the stones of emptiness.’  But a word of peace comes through the confusion: prayer in the name of His Beloved Son does not fall upon stones of emptiness. Sometimes, somewhere we shall know better than we know now how gracious the Lord is.

from Gold by Moonlight